A wireless local area network (WLAN) often includes an access point (AP) and one or more WLAN stations (STAs). As the AP and STAs share a common wireless medium, transmissions and collisions on the medium are common. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has defined a standard for WLAN medium access control (MAC) and physical (PHY) layers. A recent version of this standard is “Part 11: Wireless LAN Medium Access Control (MAC) and Physical Layer (PHY) Specifications,” IEEE Std 802.11™-2012, Mar. 29, 2012 (hereinafter “IEEE 802.11”). A STA is an addressable unit in the IEEE 802.11 standard. Some additional features proposed for IEEE 802.11 are given in “IEEE P802.11 Wireless LANS, Proposed TGax draft specification, document number IEEE 802.11-16/0024r1,” Mar. 2, 2016 (hereinafter “TGAX”). Other wireless local area network standardization schemes and activities also exist. For example, the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) has created a concept known as License Assisted Access (LAA) to unlicensed spectrum.
An AP is a physical or a virtual device that provides access, via a wireless medium (WM), for associated STAs to another network, such as the Internet. Devices in a WLAN communicate with each via the shared WM. STAs send, receive and/or interfere with each other on the shared WM. A STA is in-range of another STA when it can detect a transmission from the other STA directly.